The Tracks of Her Tears

           A mournful wail rang out in the distance, breaking the cold silence of the early December morning. Her heart gave a tiny leap at the sound. Despite her best efforts not to get her hopes up, she went to the kitchen window and squinted into the darkness, the cup of hot tea she carried steaming the frosty panes. The only thing visible in the landscape was a distant pair of glowing yellow squares that seemed to waver in the frigid air. She wasn’t the only one unable to sleep.

She watched the flickering candlelight in the neighbor’s windows for a moment longer, then turned back to the cast-iron stove and put another log in the firebox. The flames sparked and licked at the new tinder, catching the edges and burning through the wood like a ravenous wolf. Heat from the fire strained and pushed against the dense, cold air surrounding the stove, providing a momentary circle of warmth in the barren kitchen.

Drawing her prickly wool sweater tighter around her skeletal frame, she dished up a small bowl of broth and brought it to the table. The tang of wild onions tickled her nose and her stomach let out a low, desperate growl.

In the corner sat a drooping sack of flour and meager pile of potatoes, all that she had left to eat. She quickly calculated in her head how long she could make it all last before the next supply train could come through.

With a deep, long sigh, she bowed her head and dropped it into withered hands that were cracked and bleeding, chapped from the bitter cold. The brittle bones protruded sharply through thin, papery skin that split with the slightest bump or scrape. Their condition would only worsen tomorrow when she was forced to venture out to cut more wood for the fire.

Thick snow blanketed the still landscape. It had been weeks since it blew through and socked in all the residents on this solitary mountaintop. It seemed like they had seen the worst of it, but the air carried a scent of evergreen and loam, accompanied by a distinct metallic tang.

More snow was on its way.

She thought of the gap that cut through the mountains. Workers had been diligently clearing the tracks since the last snowfall and were almost through the cut. Just a few days more and the trains could make it through. If more snow fell before the trains ran, the tracks could freeze over and there would be no more deliveries until the ice melted in the spring. 

Last winter, a series of relentless blizzards filled the gap to the treetops. It was months before trains were able to get supplies to the village and many of the mountain families succumbed to starvation and sickness.

A dark pall befell the villagers, who trudged wearily through the countryside looking for food sources that didn’t exist. No vegetation grew from the frozen soil and animal life had gone into hibernation, or had long departed for warmer climes. Hopelessness and despair were the people’s only sustenance.

Images of gaunt men, women, and children clutching heavy coats that hung from their emaciated frames flipped through the woman’s mind like a film reel as she thought of that desperate time. But it was another mental picture that filled her heart with an ache more profound than any of the other abominations she had witnessed.

Her head was suddenly flooded with memories of her infant child, a beautiful baby boy with plump, pink cheeks, tiny fingers and toes, and a shock of white-blonde hair that framed his crystalline blue eyes. She could physically feel the heft and warmth of his tiny, wriggling body in her arms, could hear his bubbled cooing, and see the brilliant smile that lit up when he focused on her face.

Those same arms, now barren and cold, were instead filled with the weight of her overwhelming loss and grief. A lone, stray tear escaped the corner of her eye and traced an icy path down her sunken, hollow cheek. She unceremoniously swiped it with the back of her wrist and focused her attention once again on the bowl of soup in front of her, which had grown as cold as the bitterness in her heart.

The monotony of her lonely days was wearing on her, and the ache of seclusion and isolation left her soul emptier than the void in her stomach - a gnawing, all-consuming despair that stripped away her sanity and hope.

She thought more than once about just opening the door and walking into the woods, trudging mindlessly through the snow into the underbelly of the tall pine forest until she could go no farther. Only then would she allow herself to sink into the bleak, frigid terrain, and finally succumb to Mother Nature’s cruel, unforgiving hands like so many others before her.

It would be so easy. Just walk until she could walk no more. That’s what her husband had done the year before. Unable to cope with the death of his only son, and unwilling to bear the debilitating sorrow of his wife, he stepped out into the swirling madness of the raging blizzard, never to return.

His body was found in the spring when sun finally melted the ice and snow on the mountainside. In his frozen hand, he clutched a tattered slip of paper onto which he’d scratched a single, ominous sentence: “God is dead, and, in death, I shall make Him answer for His sins.”

Inexplicably, she had kept the note that the searchers carried back to her cabin. Left alone with insurmountable torment, she trudged mindlessly through the mundane tasks that filled the empty days and endless nights, moving more by rote and habit than conscious thought. Because thinking was unbearable. The injustices were innumerable and the answers for them nil. So, she sank deeper into the frozen landscape of her heart, making a mental list of the atrocities she would require God to answer for when at last they met face to face.

A flicker in her periphery caught her attention. The lamp was running low of oil. She crossed to the kitchen cabinets and took down the oil jug, itself nearly empty. Just one more reminder that the trains must come, and come soon.

Before she had a chance to refill the lamp, that low, mournful wail she heard earlier reappeared. Louder this time. Closer. Her heart plummeted in her chest as she recognized the familiarity of it.

Wind.

Relentless, harsh, merciless wind, carrying on its back the blizzard that would seal the doom of all who lived on that frigid mountaintop.

The sound of it was like a mocking laugh as it rocketed towards her tiny home and slammed into it with such a force that the very foundation rocked. White flakes streaked through the cracks in the board-and-batten walls, leaving a dusting along the bare floors until it hit the heat from the stove and melted on the hearth.

The temperature dropped 10 degrees in mere seconds, effectively blotting out any warmth and small measure of comfort she drew from the fire.

She let out a howl of her own, a plaintive roar of anguish and defeat that morphed into a guttural, animalistic rumbling of anger. She raised the jug of oil high, momentarily spilling its contents onto her head, and smashed it into the stove with all the force of pent-up rage and misery she had long held at bay.

As the oil flamed, it spun and danced along the floor, alighting the wood and furnishings and crawling up the fabric of her woolen dress until she was engulfed in a hellish inferno. Just then in the distance, above the sound of the crackling flames and the roaring gale that surged outside the burning cabin, a long, low whistle pierced the air, followed by the puffing of steam and the clanging of steel wheels chugging along iron tracks.

Salvation had at long last found its way to the mountaintop.

Driven fully mad by the irony of her present agony, she threw her head back and released an insane cackle. Lifting her scorched, burning arms aloft in the glacial environ like a phoenix rising, she cursed God and warned him of her coming,

And the whistle blew.